Households typically include a number of connected devices and these connected devices have needs to access resources such as goods, services, and data. For example, consumers have refrigerators for storing food, gas meters for measuring gas usage, electric meters for measuring power usage, and water meters for measuring water usage. Recently, “smart” versions of some of these connected devices have been introduced to the public. It has been contemplated that such smart connected devices could be capable of automatically requesting resources such as software updates, goods or services. However, each time a connected device initiates a transaction (usually over a wireless area network) there is a chance that details of the transaction (including payment account information or other access credentials) and/or sensitive credential information associated with the connected device may be intercepted and the owner of the device may be defrauded. Given the proliferation of network enabled connected devices, it is difficult to provide data security to each and every interaction between each and every connected device within system.
Additionally, smart devices are often limited in the amount of information that they may process and/or transmit. Furthermore, simple smart devices are often not capable of optimizing resource selection. For example, even if a smart device is able to identify its needs (i.e., a resource that needs to be replaced), it may not be able to effectively select an appropriate replenishment/replacement resource to meet those needs.
Embodiments of the invention address these and other problems, individually and collectively.